It’s odd and instructive how a word or a phrase can lodge, a seed in my being, send its roots down, and ultimately bloom.

i. “with”

“With” is one of those words, and it carries the essence and power of Mother.

Stay with me here. This isn’t your dinner order preposition, as in “I’ll have the ravioli with marinara sauce.”  Or one of the common public conversation identifiers of the day, as in “I’m with her.” That’s the grammatical role of a preposition in speech: to establish a relationship between two things.

See what happens when you just let “with” roll around slowly in your mouth, in your being, as a flavor of relationship.

What sensations, feeling-state, associations arise?

What nourishment is there for your receiving?

Does it feel personal, as if it is meant just for you?

Does it feel somehow timeless and eternal?

Some mix of the two?

“With” as the essential nature and essence of Mother has been with me for several decades, since early on in my training as a nondual Kabbalistic healer.

 

ii. ”the held-back goodness of the heart”

“the held-back goodness of the heart” leaped off the page* and took hold of me last week. Perhaps because these days I am so aware of my stash and the unwelcome Withholding One in me who I repeatedly exile to the unheated anteroom of my life.

There are nuances to my withholding, each supported by an assumption.

reserved: goodness I set aside, a vintage wine I am willing break out for occasions that meet my personal standard for worthiness.

saved up: goodness is “mine,” I have mistakenly concluded, and therefore is in limited and nonrenewable supply.

salted away: goodness is seasonal, reckons the  squirrelly part of me. It comes and goes, and I’d better collect it when I can. Hmm, so it is not mine exactly.

stockpiled, hoarded: similar to salted away, but infused with dread that some peculiar Edward Gorey-like event will forever seal me off from any access to goodness.

Notice that the nuances are in my withholding. Goodness itself is unchanging. It doesn’t vary in quality or go bad, like those food storage experiments lingering at the back of the fridge.

Notice that scarcity arises from my misunderstanding that I am the only source of goodness. The Sane One in me wholeheartedly testifies that goodness is both boundless and ever-present.

Goodness itself is mine, part and parcel of my imperfect human life and even my personality, yet not something I personally own.

Goodness: timeless and eternal, what I am made of.

With: timeless and eternal,  how I am nourished and nourish others.

Mother: timeless and eternal, no matter what.

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*The phrase is from Beautiful Painted Arrow (Joseph Rael), co-author with David Kopacz MD of Walking the Medicine Wheel, Healing Trauma and PTSD. Thanks to my dear writing buddy Deborah Green for gifting me with the book.